Plain Dane
Bill Newman
“What are you doing this weekend?” Timothy asked.
Timothy was Madeline’s boss, and she’d been in his department long enough to know he wasn’t
interested in her answer. He simply wanted an excuse to tell her what his plans were for the weekend.
His last jaunt involved spending the four-day Easter break on a friend’s yacht cruising the
Mediterranean off St. Tropez. She wondered whether or not he did it to make her feel somehow
inferior. She’d been used to that in high school. Plain Dane they called her. Coming top of the class
and excelling in athletics seemed to give her classmates extra license to tease her. They also made
her conscious of the fact that she’d never qualify for the “pretty girls” clique.
“I’m visiting family in Copenhagen,” she replied.
“Copenhagen?”
It’s in Denmark, she felt like saying. “Yes, you know my parents are Danish. I have cousins, aunts,
and uncles there, and I speak—“
He cut her off. “Dead language, of course.” He then proceeded to tell her about his long weekend,
hunting game in Scotland. “Catching a flight to Aberdeen straight from work,” he said. “In fact, I’m off
right now. Shut up shop won’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“Oh! Can I leave early, too?”
“Yes, but first make sure there’s no outstanding urgent mail.” He picked up his bag and coat, and
departed. “Toodle-oo.”
She looked at her watch, two-thirty. Timothy had only just returned from lunch.
“There wasn’t anything urgent to deal with. She’d already done it while Timothy was at lunch.
Shutting up shop entailed ensuring all of the files were cleared away, cabinets locked, and computers
backed-up and logged off. Tasks for which her London School of Economics education was overkill.
But her MBA wasn’t why Maddie secured the prestigious Foreign Office job. Her academic credentials
helped, but the Civil Service selection board had been even more impressed by her fluency in four
languages, not counting English and Danish. Timothy couldn’t top that, or even get close, which, she
figured, was why he took every opportunity to put her down.
Maddie’s trip to Copenhagen wasn’t exactly thrilling for her, mainly because Mom and Dad would be
with her. Or rather, she’d be with them for the half-yearly hop across the North Sea to their
homeland. They insisted on paying for her ticket. “You might meet a nice Danish man,” her mother
would always say. To which Maddie would reply, “I’m British. Why would I want a Danish guy?” On this
trip they’d booked her business class, while they traveled coach. “You’re more likely to meet a well-
heeled man in the expensive seats up front.”
However, she didn’t actually meet any interesting men until the journey home. Standing in the shorter
first class check-in queue at Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport, she glanced over her shoulder. Her
parents stood twenty places back in their line. She wondered why they pushed her so hard to meet
men. Do all parents want desperately to marry-off their daughters? She was only twenty-five, plenty
of time. Or did they think she needed help because she wasn’t beautiful? What’s wrong with being
slim, intelligent, and athletic? Okay so I don’t have big boobs? Are boobs and a pretty face all men
care about?
“Did you have a good weekend?”
She turned around to face a man in a suit. “Er du talende hen til mig?” she replied, asking him in
Danish if he was speaking to her.
In London she would sometimes use this technique of pretending to be a foreigner in order to play
for time. She’d read, in a book called Blink, that the brain can make very accurate split second
decisions based on very little information. So in the two or three seconds the man grappled with
figuring out what language she was speaking, she made an assessment of him. Tall, with the boyish
good looks of Prince Harry, she guessed he was about six years older than the Prince. He had Harry’
s blue eyes and reddish fair hair, though. Wearing what looked to Maddie like an Armani suit, he’d
spoken with a BBC accent. Her verdict in that brief moment: yes, worth chatting to.
“Sorry … do… you… speak… any… English,” he said, making every word sound like a separate
sentence.
She smiled. “Yes, you caught me by surprise. The weekend was okay; didn’t rain, at least.” Oh,
Christ, she thought, I’ve resorted to talking about the weather.
“You speak Danish but you sound English.”
“I speak four others languages. I’m with the FCO.” She cringed as she said it. You bloody bighead,
Madeline. But then why not? He’s not going confuse you with a fashion model.
“I’m in electronics,” he said. “But I won’t bore you with that. Do you live in London or are you traveling
onwards from Heathrow?”
Hmm, why is he asking? “Yes, in the burbs, Redbridge.”
“Oh, not far away. I live in Islington.”
“Ticket please.” The Danish woman at the BA counter said, making no attempt to speak in her native
tongue.
Maddie handed her the electronic ticket printout.
The man leaned over her shoulder and spoke to the ticket agent. “Any chance of us sitting next to
each other, assuming that’s okay?”
Maddie wondered to whom he’d addressed the last part of this question and nodded for the benefit
of the agent. “Can I have your ticket then, sir?” the agent asked.
“Hope you don’t mind,” the man said. “My name is Robert.”
“No, of course not.” OF COURSE NOT! “I’m Madeline.”
The agent assigned them two adjacent seats in row three, and checked their bags.
”We’ve got plenty of time for a drink first,” Robert said. “I’ll catch up with you in the BA lounge. It
always takes guys longer to go through security.”
She felt bad about her parents languishing in the long line of people who didn’t have access to the
airline’s first class watering hole. On the way out she’d stayed with them in Heathrow’s shopping-mall-
come-fast-food-eatery. Her dad had wanted to buy a raffle ticket for a Ferrari on show there. Mom
vetoed it, telling him he’d never win the car, and even if he did it was too low for her to get into.
Maddie thought he wouldn’t mind driving the sleek red sports car alone, but didn’t say so.
Her thoughts returned to her parents in the lounge with all the other coach-class travelers. Don’t feel
guilty. This is what they want you to do, for heaven’s sake.
Robert joined her at the bar in the lounge. “I hope you didn’t already pay for that,” he said, pointing
to her gin and tonic.
“No, I gave them your seat number.”
“I didn’t think… Oh, that’s a joke. Sorry, I’m a bit slow and a trifle distracted being with a pretty
woman.’
Pretty woman, indeed. Must not have his contacts in.
She managed to avoid telling him she still lived with her parents, concentrating on her job as project
manager organizing the rescue of Brits in dire trouble in various parts of the globe.
Robert seemed to think she wouldn’t know much about computer hardware until she told him she had
an MBA and had written her thesis on the topic of the dot-com bubble. He revealed that he held
some patents, but brushed the achievement aside as being something anyone could do.
They called the Heathrow flight.
On the short hop home, Maddie wondered how she was going to explain to Robert the presence of
her parents at the baggage carrousel. “Oh, yes, they always chaperone me and travel in coach.”
She knew she’d think of something, but forty minutes into the flight hadn't so far. At that moment, the
captain announced they’d be landing in ten minutes.
“Have I got time to go to the loo?” Robert asked one of the flight attendants.
“Yes, be quick.”
Robert disappeared, and Maddie did, too, but not to the toilet. She dashed to the back of the plane.
She leaned over and whispered in Danish. “Mom, I’ve met a guy, so—”
“Understood, dear,” her mother replied in English. “We’ll see you later, at home.”
Maddie stood beside Robert waiting for their bags to appear. Her parents had positioned themselves
on the other side of the carrousel. Her Mom had a silly grin on her face and nodded a couple of
times. Okay, Mom, I get it, you think he looks acceptable.
Outside the terminal Robert grabbed a taxi, took Maddie’s bag from the baggage cart, and opened
the door for her. She hopped in, not used to the regal treatment.
They headed into town. “You can drop me at any Central Line station,” she said.
“I thought we might go somewhere to eat first,” he said.
Maddie had to concede that it sounded like a good idea: more time with this guy. “Oh, okay.” She
looked at her watch: eight o’clock. “As long as I get to an Underground station by eleven. I have to
work tomorrow.” She wondered if he’d take her request as a hint she wouldn’t accept an offer to
sleep at his place.
“So do I. There’s plenty of time.”
Robert found them a Greek restaurant in Islington. She didn’t know it at the time but the place was
only a block away from his condo.
“I come here because the people know me. Plus, I’ve been to the Greek village where they’re from.”
“Oh, when?”
“I was touring Greece with a former girlfriend. We visited lots of little villages but actually stayed at a
bed and breakfast place in Trythnia, a beautiful location for a holiday home but a really awkward
place to reach. It’s at the western end of the Peloponnese.”
“And Trythnia is where the owner of this restaurant lived?” Maddie asked.
“Yes, they owned the B&B we stayed at.”
“What happened to the former girlfriend?” Maddie made eye contact with him to see if he objected to
the question.
Robert laughed. “That’s two questions you’re asking. One: what did I find wrong with her? And two:
what didn’t she like about me?”
Maddie started to stutter an apology, but he held up his hand. “I was kidding, Maddie. But seriously, it’
s reasonable that you should expect an answer.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“I’m going to tell you anyway. First question: I thought she was overly controlling.”
Maddie frowned, but was pleased. Good, that’s not me. “In what way?” she asked.
“She wanted to redesign the interior of my condo. When I said I was quite happy with it the way it was,
she went into a pout and then made little comments about it for weeks. She had this Pavlovian
tendency to attach reward to my changing the color scheme. She’d say things like, ‘I might want to
spend more time in your bedroom if it didn’t look so hideous.’ And then add that she was just kidding.”
“Kidding about what? Spending more time in your bedroom?”
Robert laughed so loud that he almost choked on his souvlaki. He reached for his glass of water and
drank half of it. “Yes, I should have asked her that,” he said.
“And what about the other side of the coin?”
Robert chuckled, as though he was trying to suppress his laughter and another choking fit. “The only
failure of mine that seemed to annoy her was the one I already mentioned.”
From what she’d seen of him, Maddie could easily believe he didn’t have any serious faults. But then
she asked herself: what does he see in me? How can I ask him without looking bloody stupid?
She needn’t have worried. Robert must have sensed what she was thinking. “The kind of girl I think I’
m compatible with is slim and sporty, a good conversationalist and quick witted. But I guess those last
two go together.”
Wow, what a smooth talker, but she wondered whether or not he was the type who varied his pitch to
suit the situation. She decided to change the subject and they swapped information on their
respective jobs. Robert supplied more details on his work designing machine tool robots but did not
reveal who employed him.
Perhaps he’s worried about secrets, or his work might be related to the military, Maddie thought. She
understood, because she had the problem of confidentiality in her own job. “So when Mr. X in country
Y has landed in jail…” she said and continued in a similarly ambiguous manner.
“And do you have any current attachments, Maddie?” he asked, when she’d finished her story.
Now it was her turn to reach for a glass of water, mainly in an attempt to hide her beet red face. What
do I tell him? This is the watershed, she told herself. I have to be honest with him. She couldn’t stand
the thought of developing a relationship with this gorgeous guy and then be let down later. Although
absolute honesty wasn’t a policy most of her friends and colleagues seemed to employ. You’re not
them. Start as you mean to go on, girl.
At that moment the waiter arrived and put the bill on the table, giving her a few more moments of
thought. “There’s no rush, sir. More coffee?” He then turned to Maddie. “I always tell Mr. Robert to
imagine he’s in the Peloponnese. As he knows, madam, we live life at a leisurely pace there,
although we drink more ouzo than coffee.”
Robert looked at the bill. “It’s a bit warmer in the Peloponnese, as I recall, Anton.”
Anton laughed. “Indeed it is.”
Robert fished a credit card out of his pocket and gave it to him. “And as usual, you’ve under-charged
me. I’ll make it up on the tip.”
“Thank you, sir.”
When Anton had gone, Maddie had her speech clear in her mind. “There are two things I have to tell
you, Robert.”
“The meal was lousy and you’ve got a splitting headache,” Robert said.
She laughed. “Not quite.”
Anton returned and Robert completed the paperwork. Anton seemed ecstatic over the size of the tip,
and Maddie had to wait while he regaled Robert on Greek cooking and the beauty of his native land.
A smaller tip would have got rid of him more quickly, but she chided herself for the uncharitable
thought. Finally, they were alone again. Maddie lowered her voice. “I’m a virgin,” she said.
“Oh, that’s one more thing I like about you,” he replied.
Her mind raced. What did he mean by that? Another inscription on the gold chalice on his
mantelpiece: Madeline, my first Scandinavian virgin?
“What’s the second thing you want to tell me?”
“I still live with my parents.”
“I’m having a hard time figuring out why these two revelations are so earth-shattering,” Robert said.
His reply caught Maddie with no easy comeback. It wasn’t what she had expected him to say.
However, his next statement came as no surprise. Looking at his watch, he said, “I have to get you to
the station.”
For part 2, click here